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Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has worked in book publishing for 25 years. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (for the SFBC and others), and is now does marketing for Wiley. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year (and he's doing it again now!). He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Publishers Weekly reported yesterday that the Najafi Companies, the mysterious holding company that bought the book- and music-club assets known by a bewildering array of names (Yes Solutions, Direct Brands, Doubleday Entertainment, Direct Group North America, Bertelsmann Direct, Bookspan, "the entity") from Bertelsmann back in 2008, has sold those assets to what seems to be an even more mysterious entity called Pride Tree Holdings.

Good luck to my old compatriots still working at the clubs, though this certainly doesn't look like a good sign from the outside. PW notes that the operation has been "steadily downsized in recent years," but all of the major clubs seem to still be running and Direct Brands is claiming 8 million members, which ain't chicken feed. Najafi is privately held, so no revenue or sales figures (or details on the Pride Tree deal) are or will be forthcoming.

From what I've heard, the downsizing has been the usual corporate type: get rid of half of the people and insist on running the same level of business. And we all know how well that usually works.